Category Archives: Knightswood Secondary School

Words that burn project

Hello readers,

I thought of refreshing us in this difficult time with some happy memories from the brilliant ‘words that burn’ project we took part in.

First things first, Words that burn is a national project to explore and express human rights through poetry. Amazing, isn’t it?

The first meeting was held by the poet Ash Dickinson showed us that we can all create poems and put us in a creative mood. Amnesty International representatives launched the project and after an introduction to human rights they divided us in small groups to work on our poems about some of them.

Some of us didn’t even know what a poetry slam was, until we attended one in the Mitchell library theatre. We were incredibly lucky to see the talented Dean Atta, Anita Govan and Jenny Lindsay performing. They were very inspiring, and we have talked about their poems for weeks.

After the encouraging workshop held by Anita Govan, our pupils were ready to take part in the Hillhead Library Local Poetry Slam Competition.

Every group showed great talent and bright minds, and we were very proud when one of our groups won with a sharp poem about climate change.

The last step would have been a final poetry slam in the Mitchell Library, where pupils from all the twelve participating schools would have the chance to see performing few selected pupils and grab a copy of their poems anthology. Unfortunately, we had to postpone this event; but this doesn’t prevent us from sharing our happy memories.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Amnesty International, SLIC, Glasgow Life and the poets who have collaborated with us.

Also a huge thank you goes to Knightswood Secondary School, in particular Mr Beaton and his S2 class.

For those who want to know more about the UDHR there is a very good online course about it on Futurelearn at this link:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/the-universal-declaration-of-human-rights

For now, this is all.

We hope to be able to share with you our poems and physical celebration soon!

Hello Everybody!

For this month post, we thought to share we you a new project that took place this year: Coderdojo.

We are approaching the end of it, so we think this is a good time to tell you a bit more…

It’s hard to set a specific time when the idea came up, but it was definitely possible thanks to different personalities that work for Glasgow Life, and in particular to Claire, the STEM coordinator.

It took a team effort to identify the right library, the right time and the right pupils for the project, but with the help and support of different librarians across the city, we made it!

The young people were trained for six weeks both by Claire and two youth workers, Joni and Alan. We learnt how to communicate effectively to younger children, how to give instructions, but more importantly we learnt how to be a team.

January marked the “action” time, that meant we could to go to Knightswood community library and finally meet our younger coderdojoers and develop with them their coding skills.

It has been impressively good to see how well the young people responded to the project and interacted between each other.

Last, but not least our mentors: three seniors who worked together to build the perfect team. Their abilities and expertise got perfectly mix and the result is we all have had great time together.

This is what one of our mentors says:

“Coderdojo is not only a good way to teach kids about coding and how to use code, but it is also an enjoyable experience for the young people involved in which they can develop a fun and interesting life skill”.

The results achieved made us confident that this will be just the pilot for a bigger project across the city!